The New Coke Experience

Today I'm going to take you on a journey.  A journey involving music and advertising, brand loyalty, nightmares of late-stage capitalism, and, most of all, high-fructose corn syrup.  Lots of it.

Yes, friends, it is time to talk about New Coke!  Before I do, enjoy this traditional song of my people ("my people" being "people who were preteen girls in the '90's").  I have had it in my head all week and now you will too: 



I... might have to talk about this lesser-known Coke fiasco as well, so hold that thought.  In the meantime, have a somewhat more immediately relevant song from a Maurice Starr-involved group from Boston:



In one of the weirder cross-promotions in recent memory, to celebrate the upcoming third season of "Stranger Things", Coke has brought back the notorious 1985 New Coke recipe for a limited run.  Normally, if you want to try New Coke here in the future, you'll either have to order the stuff from their website or go to an event.  But recently, Dinosaur Dracula ran a contest to win one of the cans of New Coke.  I entered on a whim because hey, why not me?

And I won!  As I held the can in my hand, a can that had already been on a heck of an adventure, I could not help but feel a wondrous sense of destiny.  First, enjoy this documentary about the New Coke fiasco:



That was a Lot.  On the one hand, I couldn't help but wonder if this is where we, as a culture, learned that big corporations will bend to our will if we scream at them loud enough.  Which, let's be clear, is a terrible terrible thing.

Except in this one case.

See, imagine if, when Disney Presents Real People "Aladdin" was released last week, somehow all our copies of the animated "Aladdin" vanished.  Unbelievable, and that's essentially what Coke did.  The change lasted a couple months and was such a spectacular debacle that to this day, Coke cans must assure us that they have the "Original Taste".  Behold:

This of course gave me a chance to taste-test, uh, Not-New Coke.  Which brings me to the thing with me and New Coke.  I have read about it.  I have heard about it.  It has been a go-to “Hey, remember that weird thing that happened in the 80’s” reference nearly my entire life.

And it is one of the very rare generation-defining pop culture events that I completely missed out on.  To be fair, I was seven at the time.  New Coke wouldn't have registered to me because, well, everything was new to me.  I might have even drank it back then, I wouldn't know.  In any case, now was my chance as a (mostly) fully-aware adult person to taste New Coke.

Two things before I give my verdict.  First, and most important, if you were about to scream at me for cracking open a can of soda and drinking it instead of leaving it in a display case or preserving it in amber or something because it is a ~*~Limited Edition~*~ or whatever, please don't.  On the one hand, full soda cans don't preserve well as evidenced by my friend whose shelf was obliterated in an incident involving OK Soda.  Also, I (barely) survived Beanie Babies and the very idea of ~*~Limited Edition~*~ anything is, as the kids say, Maximum Cringe.

Second and more important, fellow long-time fans of Matt's writing will probably have already realized something amusing.  And it's that he would have had to send this dear little can of Coke deep in the heart of Pepsi territory:

(Sadly, the old X-Entertainment Bar Harbor adventure seems to be lost to the mists of time.  I didn't have any Pepsi to compare anyway.  Nor Moxie or Captain Eli for that matter.)

So, after all this, how did it taste?!?

Um, well, hmm...

It's... okay.  Not great, certainly not changing a hundred-year-old recipe for, but not the malted battery acid I had been left to expect all these years.  For the very curious, good luck in acquiring a can.  For the mildly curious, it's not worth it.

Now about the Coke-involving fiasco I do remember:



How cool would it be to pop open a can of soda and have money pop out instead?  Well, turns out this was a good idea in theory, because many of these Magic Cans malfunctioned.  You wouldn't know you had a winning can until you'd drank your Coke.  Which would be fine... if Coke had not decided, for reasons unknown, that foul-smelling chlorinated water was the right thing to fill these Magic Cans with.  And so the Magic Summer lasted about a month.  Would I have known about this, or even cared, if New Kids on the Block weren't involved?  Probably not.

Anyway, I think I'm going to drink some water.

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Art!  A little landscape.  Or Lake-scape.

The '90s Were Our '70s. Let's Watch "Witching You Were Here"!

The earlier Disney Parks specials have a certain "'70s-ness".  This special, however, celebrating the 25'th anniversary of Walt Disney World, has what I can only describe as a '90s-ness.

And also a '70s-ness.  See, I remember reading somewhere that you'd never be able to write a truly accurate depiction of life during the '70s without including the rampant '50s nostalgia.  Guess what rampant nostalgia '90s kids were bombarded with?

And so, we have a Disney Park special that whisks two little boys from 1971 through time to land in 1996.  Yup, it's bonkers.  It's more fun than "The Dream is Alive" at least; we actually get to see Walt Disney World for one thing.



Highlights to watch out for include the infamous Castle Cake, a deeply troubling walk-around Quasimodo costume, a God-damn "Really 700 Years Old" gag in a Disney special?!? 😨, and -of course- a mime!  Because it isn't a truly baffling vintage Disney Parks special without mimes.

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Art of the Day!

So, I've been thinking about the "Kingdom Hearts 3" trailer a lot, and I think my very favorite part is when this happens:

But the 90's Were Also Really Freakin' Weird - Let's Watch "Journey Into Magic"

Disney has done a lot of specials promoting their theme parks over the years. This one is certainly one of the most special... for a given definition of "special".



OK, there's a lot to unpack here.

The highlights are the extinct and just-new attractions of course.  Splash Mountain gets an especially strange segment, as does Pleasure Island.  But there's also a nice, long segment about the in-park animation studio, including the briefest teases of the then-upcoming "Lion King" and "Pocahontas".

There's also a couple of running segments that seem to go on forever about a boring family living out their wildest dreams via Disney Magic, a golfer trying to hit every hole on WDW property, and some dude trying to stay in every Disney resort because why not?  The whole special seems to be assuring parents that there's lots for adults to do in WDW circa 1993.

Sidenote: the more I see/hear about the Adventurer's Club, the more upset I am that I never got to experience it for myself. 

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Sketch of the Day!

Some Thoughts After Watching All Thirteen Episodes of "The Wuzzles"

It's been a while since I shared something from my "Watch Later" YouTube queue, hasn't it?  Well, strap yourselves in, kids, cause this one is a doozie.  It's a playlist that preserves the complete series of Disney Television Animation's very first effort, "The Wuzzles".

Watching "The Wuzzles" for the very first time since 1985 was an experience, let me tell you.



Okay, it honestly stuns me that I haven't written anything at length about "The Wuzzles" since way, way back in 2006.  (That essay is reposted here.  Forgive the early blog format.)  This wasn't my favorite show from when I was a child, but it's the first show I ever remember really liking and watching -- or, rather, the first show I remember making a conscious choice to watch.

You see, back in the early 80's, the landscape of children's cartoons was really f-ing bleak.  If you want a good idea of just how really f-ing bleak it was, take a look at these two recent AV Club Inventories.  Have a strong drink at the ready.

Into this (I can't emphasize this enough) really f-ing bleak environment came two Saturday morning cartoons from what was then considered an unlikely source: Disney.  In those days, and this is totally understandable (read those Inventories again), television cartoons were considered the lowest rung on the animated ladder.  That Disney would wish to enter that arena was shocking.  However, as stated in this article from the time, Disney Television Animation wished to bring some sophistication to Saturday morning.  So, we have to thank Michael Eisner for making television a safe place for quality animation, at least indirectly.

Now here's where things get strange.  Disney produced two series for the autumn of 1985, "The Wuzzles" and "Adventures of the Gummi Bears".  And this would be absolutely unthinkable today, but these two first experiments in television animation from Disney aired on different networks in America.  At the same time.  Like literally they aired on different channels in the same time slot.  "Gummi Bears" was much more successful and went on to become one of Disney's longest-running animated television series ever, surviving even into the early '90s.  Meanwhile "Wuzzles" lasted for just one season of -and this blew my mind to smithereens when I found out- only thirteen episodes.

Thirteen episodes!  Sweet unlikely hybrids with inexplicable fairy wings, thirteen episodes!  How is that even possible?  As I said, this was the first Saturday morning cartoon I ever really liked, and it's shadow looms absurdly large over my childhood; the way I drew, the stories I wrote, the characters I invented.  Hell, who am I kidding?  You can still see some influence from the show on me to this day!  "The Wuzzles" meant an awful lot to me for a very long time, and it did it with only thirteen episodes.  It's like the "Firefly" of Disney animation, though I hasten to clarify after refreshing my memory that I mean that in a ratio of "amount of nostalgia" to "actual shockingly low number of episodes" sense, nothing more.

Before we get into that, let's talk about what I liked about "The Wuzzles" while watching it for the first time since childhood.  This show is, especially for it's time, lush.  The animation is stellar for a television cartoon from the 80's; roughly on-par with the much later "Animaniacs" (both series as well as "Gummi Bears" featured the work of the studio TMS Entertainment).  The characters are always on-model, the backgrounds are gorgeous, and the voice acting is generally very good.  I wasn't really sold on Stan Frieberg's narration at first, but then I realized that it was starting to feel like he was struggling to describe a vivid fever dream, which made the proceedings much more entertaining as an adult.

I'm especially fond of two things that, happily, turned out to be just as good as I remembered from childhood: the score and the set design.  The synth-heavy score is very definitely of its time, but is pretty sophisticated for electronic background music in an 80's cartoon.  By the set design, I mean take a look at the houses in the neighborhood where the main characters live.  Each one is distinct, tells you everything you need to know about its resident, and sports a crazy amount of detail even objectively better cartoons don't bother with.

So there's the good thing about revisiting "The Wuzzles" as an adult; it is at least pleasant to look at and to listen to.  Now here comes the upsetting part: other than that, "The Wuzzles" is not as good as I remembered.  This is almost maddening because, see, I remembered almost every key moment from every episode.  But watching these episodes as an adult... they weren't *horrible*, mind you, they just didn't seem to deserve the huge place they occupy in my earliest animation-related memories.  That's pretty heavy stuff, if you think about it.

And speaking of heavy, I have to warn people who are going to be watching this 1985 cartoon for children by Disney for the first time ever in the year 2013 about the one thing that surprised and honestly really upset me the most about "The Wuzzles": this show just straight-up HATES overweight women.  It really does.  Take a drink whenever poor Hoppopotamus is the victim of a fat joke.  Ugh.

Speaking of the characters, it was also a pretty big blow to see my favorite character, Moosel, for the first time in forever.  Yes, this was my favorite character as a child.  For the life of me I could not tell you why.  With all due respect to the late Bill Scott, Moosel's voice is very obnoxious.  He's also the most boring character of the lot, personality-wise.  But what made me cringe most of all is his character design and animation.  He's just unpleasant to look at now, especially with those weird floppy walk-cycles they gave him.  What kills me is that I loved this character enough to base some of my early character designs on him!  I don't know anything about anything anymore!?!

Overall, what disappointed me the most about "The Wuzzles" is the writing.  The stories told in these thirteen episodes aren't all that interesting to be honest.  The best episodes take a boring plot and put a weirder spin on it, and they're the ones most worth watching.  (My favorites are "The Terrified Forest" and "Class Dismissed."  I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Ghostrustlers" because it manages to be insane even by the standards of both "The Wuzzles" and Required-By-Law 80's Cartoon Episodes Set in the Old West.)  What surprised me this time out was that this is a series that in the course of only thirteen episodes manages to have THREE episodes ("In The Money", "Elaroo's Wishday", and "What's Up, Stox?") where the lesson is, "be careful what you wish for".  And it hit me like a brick as an adult that each and every one of those episodes might as well have sat their young audience down and said, "Those grapes are SO sour, kids, you wouldn't believe it."

So here I am, wiser, disillusioned, with fresher, less rose-tinted memories of a very important part of my early childhood dancing in my head and haunting my dreams.  I do plan on watching and reviewing "Gummi Bears" next week, having already tackled other early efforts from Walt Disney Television Animation like this one.  But I also hope to quickly wash this one off with something else that I thankfully already know holds up...

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Sketch of the Day!  Ooh, they got originality...

So, Reading _Jurassic Park_ in 2013 is Weird as Hell.

That's about all that really need be said.  Reading the original, printed page Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Park from 1990 in the year of our lord 2013 is weird as hell.

Listen, I was hoping to do a whole series of blog posts dissecting the dinosaur-involving parts of the novel and analyzing them in the light of modern paleontological discoveries, but the fact is, I just... can't.  Because the novel moves so fast that it's more worthwhile to give you a guide to weird stuff to pay attention to as you yourself read it, since it still holds up overall.  And more than anything, I noticed two things during this read-through, the first time I'd read the book since my teens:

1) I was surprised by how many of the weird things in the movie came from the book.  And it goes way deeper than the Lysine Contingency or the "They Can't See You If You Don't Move" thing; things that appear briefly in the movie but are much, much better explained in the book.  I mean, like, the most quotable movie lines from Ian Malcolm and John Hammond's obsession with ice cream and, of course, the much-ballyhooed CD-ROM in the tour vehicles

2) You NEED to have a drinking game in play to deal with the book version of Alexis Murphy.  You do.  Because holy, holy, holy sh*t.  Yeah, I'm going to say it.  I'm going to say it and nobody can stop me!  Here I go!  Book!Lex is a better contender for Worst Character Ever than JarJar Binks.  And that obnoxious robot chicken thing from "Quest For Camelot".  And Towelie.  Because all she does though the entire book is whine and cry and complain that she's hungry and play baseball and complain that she's hungry and be bored by the fact that HOLY SH*T SHE IS SURROUNDED BY DINOSAURS OMG!!! and complain that she's hungry.  Seriously, you actually want her to end up violently eviscerated by the end of the book.  Honest to God, the smartest thing Spielberg did was age Lex several years and give her some useful (if instantly dated [Edit: Meaning her self-identifying as a hacker]) skills.  Take a shot whenever Book!Lex whines that she's hungry and two shots when she argues with her brother.  And be careful with these rules.

For reals, here are the weird bits of Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park collected from my Kindle Notes, in rough order:

* - Hey, remember when biotechnology changed everything?  Biotech changing everything instead of the Internet and computers, I mean?  Reminder for the Millennial Kids in the audience: NOBODY saw smart phones coming.  Then again... (I will let somebody else joke about the Monsato cluster-eff...)

* -  August, 1989.  So all of the events of Jurassic Park, which I'd assume was meant to be taking place in the not-to-distant future, are actually happening in the late-80's. 

* - Crichton makes a big deal of the "slippery, slimy... foamy" dinosaur saliva, as well as the "rotten stench, a smell of death" associated with dinosaur attacks.  All through the book, there's a very uncomfortable dance between "dinosaurs aren't monsters; they're just another kind of animal" and "OMG ELDRITCH DEMON FROM AN ANCIENT TIME!!!"  It gets awkward as the book goes on.

* - "It was hardly bigger than a chicken..."  Poor Compsognathus.  Doesn't matter how many cool things paleontologists learn about you, you will always be the "chicken-sized dinosaur", even when chickens are the "chicken-sized dinosaur".
Except this is supposed to be Procompsognathus, which is a different animal entirely... wut?

* - And "compy" venom is "more primitive" than squamate venom.  I don't think...?

* - I would like to know if paleontologists really do "measure time in beer".

* - Ah, the Great Dromeosaur Nomenclature F***-Up!  We've actually already covered this here at the Obligatory Art Blog, so let's not even get into it. Even though it affects a huge portion of the novel.  "Six feet long" ugh...

* - Dammit, I want a "Jurassic Park" (the movie) prequel with Hammond's tiny elephant and guys calling Dr. Grant after Midnight to ask what baby dinosaurs would eat.  Also, something involving the tiny pet dinosaurs Biosyn was worried about.  (Let's ignore "Prehysteria".)

* - Dr. Grant is totally Dr. Horner.  There is, like, no question.  "Egg Hill"?  C'mon.

* - In that aforementioned prequel, I want a whole plotline where the JP technicians extract DNA, throw it in an egg, and see what hatches.  In, just as a reminder, 1989.  Cause gee wizz, it sure is convenient that they only hatched out popular dinosaurs or, for that matter, known genre.  Imagine if they hatched out something like Pegomastax in 1989?!?

* - So... the park is called "Jurassic Park".  Most of the animals are from the Cretaceous period.  All the eggs are hatched in "Jurassic atmosphere".  Doesn't anyone know what Mesozoic means anymore?

* - Throughout the novel, there's an uncomfortable relationship between "dinosaurs are very definitely reptiles" (to the point where a baby "velociraptor" even has a snakelike tongue) and "wait, no, dinosaurs are the direct ancestors of birds".  Species are described alternatively as big lizards and as giant birds of prey.  This gets weird after a while.

* - Ah, the Version 4.4 conversation.  Briefly paraphrased, the general public doesn't want Real Dinosaurs, they want what they expect dinosaurs to be like thanks to pop culture.  Pop culture like... "Jurassic Park"...

* - Arboreal Hypsilophodons.  I didn't think that was still a thing in the late 80's?

* - The "They can't see you if you don't move" thing comes from the book and, hey, it actually has an explanation!  Fancy that!

* - There's a weird moment where it's said that theropods do not have strong jaws, just strong necks.  Um...?

* - And Lex befriends a young triceratops that she has named, of all things, Ralph.  Huh...

* - "Dragonflies... The Jurassic was a time of huge insects."  Dr. Grant, I think that might have been earlier...?

* - Lots of noise about Tetanuraens being able to swim with their tails like crocodiles...

* - There's also that weird, weird scene where the Tyrannosaurus has a long, flexible, prehensile tongue which she can use to ensnare prey that would, in the late Cretaceous, be too small to bother evolving such an ability for.  Okay.

* - And the (cough) "velociraptors" are able to chew through solid-steel bars.  There is a level beyond Super-Persistant-Predator...

* - Ian Malcolm's whole long "You can't destroy the planet!  Although you very definitely could render it uninhabitable to humans.  But never mind that, because you can't literally destroy the whole planet, so f*** environmentalism!!!" Author Tract.  Ow...

* - Also, a male "velociraptor" bred in the wild is able to change colors based on emotions.  What?!?

* - And Ian Malcolm dies.  I'm only mentioning this because it gets retconned to hell and back in The Lost World.  No, I don't think I want to re-read The Lost World.  Somebody else can tackle that one.

So yes, Jurassic Park is a weird experience reading in the modern era.  Stay tuned next week for another misguided nostalgia binge!

ADDENDUM: Yay!  Metafilter found this post!  This post which is probably the one post on this blog that makes the least sense if you aren't a regular reader!  Wee!  (Dies.  Is dead.)

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Art of the Week!  Have a (slightly more) accurate Deinonychus!

In Which we Wintess the Slow Extinction of Saturday Morning Cartoons

The exact reason for the gradual phasing-out in the late 1990's of animated programs for children airing on the big three networks on Saturday mornings is highly disputed.  Many argue that the readily available children's programming on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network rendered Saturday morning cartoon blocks irrelevant.  Others note that networks probably found the 1996 FCC mandate that required at least three hours of educational content for children too restrictive.  And still others will point out the most cynical reason: airing blocks of mostly infomercials instead of a block of cartoons on the weekend was the cheaper, more profitable option.

But whoever you argue this subject with, almost everyone will agree that the beginning of the end, the Chicxulub meteor of Saturday morning cartoons if you will, was the premier of "Saved by the Bell". And that brings us to this remarkable video lurking quietly in my YouTube queue.  It's the first-ever appearance of the "Saved by the Bell" characters on NBC, on a weird special promoting (ironically enough) Saturday morning cartoons.



Now as I said before,"Saved by the Bell" has shouldered a lot of the blame for killing the Saturday morning cartoon tradition... but let's take a look at NBC's lineup here, because the animated alternatives to "Bell" suggest that the death of Saturday morning cartoons was a more excruciatingly slow process.  We've got the very bizarre final season of "The Smurfs", the second-to-last season of "Alvin and the Chipmunks", and two animated "Alf" series, one of which is completely given over to parodies of other things.  New series included the improbable "Camp Candy" and "Captain N: the Half-Hour Nintendo Game Commercial".  A look at other networks' schedules from the same year reveals several long-incumbent series broken up by head-scratching new series.

So with this in mind, I am willing to say definitively that the reasons for the big three networks essentially giving up on Saturday morning cartoons are complicated.

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Art of the Day!

The_Disney_Channel_in_the_1990s.mpeg

I'm going to just post this thing that was lurking in my YouTube Queue without further comment.

Actually, I will give you fair warning that the sound quality is blargh.  I will also warn you that, no matter what your age, your brain is not prepared for this.  It can't be.  There's no way it could be.  Your brain might actually just sh*t itself at some point during this movie; like, your spinal column will be full of brain-poop by the end of this movie.

Okay, without further ado: The Disney Channel Circa 1990 Presents Shelly Duvall Presents the Most Random Collection of Celebrities Ever Assembled Starring in, "Mother Goose Rock-N-Rhyme"...



Yeah... this probably could have stayed in the nostalgia box...

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Sketch of the Day! Have a unicorn.

"Headed For A Lil' Bit O'Trouble" - Disney Loose End #10: "Song of the South"

OK, let's just get it right on the table right away: Yes, "Song of the South" is a racially problematic film. And there are a few scenes that are downright weird and uncomfortable.

Having finally watched the film, it is absolutely understandable why Disney doesn't quite know what to do with it. Disney's usual method of dealing with the inconvenient spiky bits in the cotton candy of their films is to cut them right out. Unfortunately, there's no way to cut out the controversial portions in "Song" without altering the film beyond comprehension. And so, "Song of the South" was put on "permanent retirement" after it's anniversary re-release in 1986.

"Song of the South" quickly became the forbidden fruit of animation fans. I'd never ever get a chance to watch it, so I ran on what little information I could get out of animation history books. And nearly all of the books agreed on one thing: The animated portions of the film are fabulous, and probably the best animation to come out of the studio's features around World War Two. But the live-action portions are so inexcusably racist, they will melt your face off.

Well, what the history books don't tell you about those same live-action portions is this: Aside from being racially problematic*, they are also really boring. Really and truly and astonishingly boring.

The only bright spot in the live-action segments is the character of Uncle Remus himself. Warm and grandfatherly, his relationship with the unforgivably annoying child characters is very believable and sweet. The film picks up once he enters the story, and he leads us into the film's big "Holy Sh*t" Moment, about fifteen minutes in.

For this is where the animation begins, and it does so in a moment of... I can honestly and non-sarcastically call it Disney Magic. There are three animated stories in all, each with a signature song that I was surprised to already know all the words to. Disney may have Vaulted "Song of the South" for good, but they have lost no love for the songs nor the animated characters. (This is as good a time as any to admit Splash Mountain may be among my favorite rides if I have to choose.)

The animation is lively and gorgeous, and what's especially interesting about the animation is the fact that it doesn't really feel like anything else Disney was doing at the time. The humor and characterization both have much more in common with what you'd see in contemporary Looney Tunes, and there are scenes in the film that are directly referenced in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". Speaking of, the moments when live-action and animated characters interact are still something truly special to see. Indeed, the only bad thing I can say about the animation here is that there is far, far too little of it.

The animated sequences are the reason why one should go through all the trouble of finding a way to watch "Song of the South". The cultural kerfuffle over the film has, sadly, overshadowed it for... well, turns out during my research that this film has been causing controversy practically since the day it was conceived. The thing is, Disney's self-censorship of the film has just exacerbated it beyond reason. I am in agreement with the Antagony and Ecstasy blog that if Disney quietly put "Song of the South" out on a limited edition Blue-Ray tomorrow, honestly most of the people buying it would be doing so just to see what the whole hubbub is all about. Until that day comes, you will, sadly, have to find the film through unconventional means. And I shouldn't encourage this kind of thing, but what choice has Disney left us with?

Well in any case, it's far more important to note now that I have caught up on every big-deal classic Disney film that contains animation! It's been a hell of a journey, and one that I recommend to anyone with even the slightest interest in animation.

That said, I'm not stopping until Disney does. Bring on "Winnie the Pooh" and "Wreck-It Ralph" and "King of the Elves" (maybe?) and "The Snow Queen"! For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.

* - "But Trish, since I don't want to go through the trouble of finding a copy of the movie, just how racially problematic *are* the live-action portions of 'Song of the South'?"

Well first off, thanks for asking a person who has actually sat down and watched "Song of the South" rather than, as I suspect, one of the many, many people who refuse to experience controversial media yet form an opinion about them anyway. But the best way to find out how offensive "Song of the South" is to *you* (and notice the emphasis on *you*, because I simply have no way of knowing what would offend *you* as different people are sensitive to entirely different things), if you're really curious, is to just watch the darn thing yourself.

Listen, essays have been written on this subject. Long ones. By people far, faaar more qualified to talk about this kind of controversial and highly emotional issue. So I don't know what I could add to the argument, but I feel I should add something. But I highly suspect I wouldn't feel compelled to elaborate on any of this if Disney hadn't self-censored the film.

And this is because honestly, the awkward ethnic identity politics here are about as offensive as other films and animation and media from the time period. As I said, I didn't find "Song of the South" as face-meltingly racist as I found it just really, really weird and uncomfortable. What do I mean by that? Well, remember, the less you resembled what Walt Disney would consider "normal", the more problematic your onscreen depiction would be. Which means that anything uncomfortable in "Song of the South" is in good company with other (suspiciously not censored) Disney films. What's up, Peter Pan. How's Princess Tiger Lily? More to the point, how's her entire tribe?

The most obviously offensive aspect of "Song of the South" is the very, very bizarre "American Adventure"-ish Disney spin and big giant smiley face it puts on one of the most horrible chapters in United States history... maybe. The movie doesn't state openly whether it takes place before, during, or after the Civil War and that's what most of the awkward scenes orbit around.

Okay, details. So in "Song of the South" there's a rich old white woman who lives in a mansion that just happens to be right near a field where poor black people cheerily whistle their way to work and are generally depicted (much like other non-WASPs in Disney's movies) as weird/scary/fascinating alien Others. The word "slave" is never spoken out loud ever, and indeed the film takes the longest possible route out of it's way to avoid any racially charged language at all. Annoying Little Boy's best friend is a black kid, and the film interestingly does not approach this friendship as unusual at all. But then you notice that said best friend is conspicuously absent during the big (and ultimately kinda pointless) birthday party scene without explanation. The only truly mean human characters are a pair of unspeakably cruel poor white boys (though that's pretty loaded in its own way come to mention it). Uncle Remus lives in his own little shack and it is shown late in the film that he can pack up and leave whenever he likes. Annoying Little Boy's mother doesn't want her son playing with Uncle Remus, and in one of the more awkward scenes, Uncle Remus does not act more assertive when confronted by her. This is all because she is really really prejudiced against... storytellers. Yup.

As it happens, the film is so obtuse and reliant on outmoded ethnic stereotypes from several generations back, I found myself saying "OMG, this is so racist!" much much less often than I was saying, "uhhh?" or "wait, what?" But if I am to be truly honest, I found the racial politics in a slightly more recent film more troubling. And there wasn't anything in "Song of the South" that was so openly racist that it melted my face off the way an obscure number in this stone-cold Christmas classic did. And "Song of the South" didn't p*ss me off nearly as much as "Gone With the Wind" did, so there's that.

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Sketch of the Day!

Such controversy! Such drama! Let's wash it all away with in-progress turtles!

"Yellowish Puce, Nilly Nally!" - Disney Loose End #13: "So Dear To My Heart"

It's early in the summer of 1903 in the picturesque little town of Fulton County, located somewhere in the mythical turn-of-the-last-century midwest that Walt Disney so loved. And here begins the tale of what is perhaps his most forgotten film with animation in it: "So Dear to My Heart".

The film is as obscure as Disney films get. It's tucked away among the Anthology Features (obscure in their own right) like an afterthought. The very few scenes of animation within the film are at least as interesting as anything in "Melody Time" or "Make Mine Music", and include some fine moments indeed.

It's too bad the film surrounding those approximately fifteen minutes of full animation is such a slog.

OK, kiddies, gather 'round. As I said before, it's 1903 and we're somewhere in the mythical candy-colored midwest that very likely existed nowhere else but in the fertile mind of Walt Disney. As legend has it, Disney grew up on a farm where... hell with it. Suspiciously, no two accounts agree on what Disney's childhood was like. But we do know that in any case, whether it was rosy and happy or horrifically traumatic, he had a lifelong affinity for farms and for the Good Old Days.

Oh, the Good Old Days! When little boys lived with their fire-and-brimstone-and-horrible-guilt-and-blatant-contradiction preachin' grannies and did all the chores that didn't involve sewing or knitting or weaving or cooking or beating rugs with those rug-beating things. When uncle Burl Ives would come over with his guitar and his folky songs and little cousin Tildy, who has been a mite bit grumpy lately since her application to the Lollipop Guild was rejected cause her little squeakie voice wasn't *quite* grating enough. Where you could raise yourself a baby lamb to win the Special Prize at the county fair, even though that lamb is... well, you know... black! Where boys could tromp through the deep woods where the owl blinks and the werewolf howls and the Skunk Ape screams, and look for bee trees, whereupon they could raid the beehive without incident and bring a fortune in honey into town. Where the highlight of a little boy's day was puttin' pretty pictures in his scrapbook, and hallucinating while reading it. And where the highlight of a little girl's day was pouting and whining and runnin' home cryin' to her daddy.

Aw, gee wizz! You all don't know how nice we had it back in the Good Old Days! You kids these days and yer card games and yer face books and yer motor cars and yer rap music and yer public schools and yer piercings and yer electricity and yer animal rights and yer child labor laws and yer civil rights and yer women's lib...

As you may have guessed, I have a healthy level of cynicism about nostalgia for the Good Old Days.

But all criticism aside, the animation is very pretty, and it has some truly beautiful moments. The idea is that Jeremiah (the little boy) is collecting pictures in a scrapbook and he imagines them coming to life. The animated characters interact with the scrapbook elements in really inventive ways. At the same time, all the animation is at the service of musical numbers with inspiring messages for the young audience, and these songs are very, very boring when they aren't downright head-scratching. There's a reason why you don't hear these ditties much anymore. (My gosh, "Stick-to-itivity"...)

So overall, "So Dear To My Heart" is pretty dull and unintentionally very, very weird. It's SO aggressively a product of it's time that children will likely either be bored silly or find the movie as utterly baffling as a student film. It's ultimately of interest only to the hardcore Disney animation completest.

For more posts in this ongoing series, go here, or click the Chronological Disney Animated Canon tag below.

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